‘The Republican Base Simply Won’t Put Up with Any More George Bushes’

That’s Roy Beck’s summary in a reported piece in the Hill on Ryan’s immigration views. (Here is Roy’s more detailed analysis.) The upshot is that the issue has just never been very important to Ryan, and he has a middling grade, worse than most House Republicans but better than most Democrats. Earlier in his career — still viewing the issue through the lens of libertarianism and influenced by Jack Kemp’s open-borders monomania — he was pretty bad on the issue, but he’s gotten a lot better more recently as a more hawkish consensus has gelled in the House GOP. Obviously, immigration has nothing to do with why he was selected, but there’s a pretty good chance that he’ll be elected president in 2016 or 2020, so it’s certainly worth examining.

Mark Krikorian
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Mark Krikorian, a nationally recognized expert on immigration issues, has served as Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) since 1995.
@MarkSKrikorian

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